I return your Esher1 with many thanks; and may I tell you, I like it dearly! I like it for the great purity and tenderness of the serious parts,—for
the sweet grace that is over the whole; I like it because it is the same as Mr Hunt talking to us, and because it falls in with my own sentiments about many things, and gives me a surer and more affectionate
hold of them.

You will not include this among those “compliments on your Husbands talents” for which you express such mortal aversion (justly, for nothing can be more nauseous) But if I like the book and the writer
of it (and I do, with my whole heart) and if I feel pleasure in saying I like them (and that I do also) I may say it, may
I not, with impunity?— At all rates I am not afraid of consequences

1. Hunt's novel Sir Ralph Esher; or, memoirs of a gentleman of the Court of Charles II appeared anonymously in three volumes in January 1832. See the Tatler for 20 Jan. and the Athenaeum for 14 Jan. The novel had little success.